Universalist Unitarian Church Santa Paula, California

The World of Harry Potter
by Reverend John Alexie Crane

As evidence for this, consider an article from Time magazine published late last December, pointing out the remarkable nature of the books. In just the past three and a half years, 76 million copies of Rowling’s books have been sold, translated into 42 different languages. The books have appeared consistently on the New York Times bestseller list. The Communist government of China, which earlier published works like the collected poems of Mao, recently produced a three volume boxed set of the Potter books in 600,000 copies. This turns out to be the largest first printing of any work of fiction since 1949, when the Communists gained control of China.

But as evidence of how deeply touched readers are by the books, consider the testimony of nine year old Tyler Walton. Tyler had fallen gravely ill with leukemia, and was subjected to the heavy duty treatment required to combat this life-threatening disease of the bloodstream. In an essay he later wrote about his response to a reading of the books while he was ill, Tyler said, “Harry Potter helped me get through some really hard and scary times. I sometimes think of Harry Potter and me as being kind of alike. He was forced into situations he couldn’t control and had to face an enemy that he didn’t know if he could beat.” Similar testimonials come from other young people around the world. They see themselves reflected in the world of Harry Potter. Just as in their own world, Harry’s contains elements like bullies and bad teachers, like friends and enemies, like success and failure, like earnest striving and also fun and frivolity.

However, also notable is the fact that adults of all ages (as the New York Times bestseller list indicates) are captivated by the story of Harry Potter. This is a highly unusual circumstance: a series of books that appeals deeply to all ages. Many of my UU minister colleagues, for example, have expressed enthusiasm for Rowling’s works; and a professor of English at Princeton University gave a lecture on the Potter world to an alumni seminar.

It’s phenomenal, without doubt. The appeal of the books, while widespread indeed, is not entirely universal. While I have not heard any young people complain about the books, I have noticed a couple of negative schools of thought among adults. For example, many members of the religious right, individuals who hold a firm conviction that the Bible is literally the word of God, strongly object to the Potter books being read in public schools. They simply do not want their children to be exposed to Harry Potter’s world. Well, why not?

Because Harry is a student in a school that, over a seven year period, trains wizards. A wizard is the male version of the female witch; and, worse still, Harry’s school also trains witches. Indeed, one of Harry’s best friends at school is a girl named Hermione Granger and she is an eager and promising witch-in-training. But in the Bible, God states unequivocally that, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” For committed believers, this is a direct command from God. It follows that, for them, the world of Harry Potter is an abomination. “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

Another school of negative response is made up of what I judge to be a substantial minority of adults who have tried at least one of the books but found themselves unable to understand their appeal. They were left cold, baffled, unenthusiastic. The magic of Harry Potter just did not work for them. It’s hard to say why this is, why a series of books that speak to millions of people in diverse cultures should entirely lack appeal to a number of others. But this is how it is.

Actually, no one fully understands the remarkable popularity of Harry Potter, including the author herself. His world is her fantasy, and that fantasy, for mysterious reasons, touches the minds and hearts of millions.

Rowling’s life has been radically changed by her sudden fame. Seven years ago, she lived in a two room apartment in Edinburgh, a single mother with a small daughter, both of them supported by public welfare. Today, her four fantastic novels are known and loved throughout the world, and she now has an income of thirty to forty million dollars a year. This, in turn, has enabled her to pay back her debt to society. Last fall, Rowling agreed to become an ambassador for a British charitable organization, the National Council for One Parent Families, and she gave the better part of a million dollars in support of the cause. Her fame is likely to expand even further this coming fall, when her first book, The Sorcerer’s Stone, will be released as a widely publicized movie.

II.
The world of Harry Potter is a fantasy, a fairly tale, and it has a noticeable medieval flavor about it. Its central characters, however, are three present-day youngsters, close friends — Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Ron Weasley. They have been chosen separately for extensive training in magic, in wizardry and witchery, at an institution with the whimsical name of “Hogwarts School.” The school is inaccessible and unknown to ordinary people, who are called Muggles by the students and faculty of Hogwarts. Muggles are everyday folks who know nothing of magic.

To any rational person who has not read the tales of Harry Potter, it must seem highly improbable that a book of this sort would be of any interest to a mature adult. Indeed, two other major characters in the book only add to the improbability. These are Albus Dumbledore, Headmaster of Hogwarts, and his bitter enemy, Voldemort. Dumbledore is the primary source of good in the world, and Voldemort is a devious, powerful, almost irresistible force for evil. As in the immensely popular Star Wars films, the theme of the Potter books is the struggle, the conflict between the forces of good and those of evil in our frequently troubled world.

In the opening of the first book, we find Harry, an orphan living with a Muggles family, Vernon and Petunia Dursley who live at 4 Privet Drive in Little Whinging in Surrey. The Dursley’s have a robust, rowdy, thoroughly spoiled son, Dudley who regularly abuses Harry over a period of years. Harry has been told by his Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon that his parents were killed in an automobile accident. Actually, the Dursleys know that this is not true. Harry’s parents were both gifted in magic, were wizard and witch, agents of the good, killed by the evil Voldemort in his relentless drive to make evil dominant in the world.

Early in the first book we learn that Harry is ten years old, approaching his 11th birthday. The Dursleys despise him for reasons that soon become clear. Petunia Dursley, a thoroughly conventional woman, is the sister of Harry’s mother; and the mother was radically unconventional, a practicing witch married to a wizard. Both of them died at the hands of the evil Voldemort. Conventional people, of course, fear and despise witches, and this is how it was between Petunia and her sister Lily, a source of intense shame to the proper Dursley family. Petunia “always got upset at any mention of her sister.”

Vernon Dursley, you see, was a man of substantial social status, the CEO of the Grunnings Corporation which manufactured industrial drills. Rowling describes him on page one as “a big, beefy man with hardly any neck, although he did have a very large mustache.” Petunia and Vernon lived in fear that the neighbors might find out that her sister was (ugh!) a witch, married to a wizard. Imagine their horror when, after Harry’s parents died, the child was left on the Dursley’s doorstep, swathed in blankets in a basket. The Dursley’s were Harry’s only living relatives. A note was slipped into Harry’s blankets explaining to the Dursleys what had happened, and telling them who the child was. Petunia had for some time avoided contact with her embarrassing sister Lily, and though Petunia had heard about the child, had never seen him.

Harry spent ten miserable years living with the Dursleys, not at all aware that he was a wizard. His room was a small closet under the stairway, and he was always subject to Uncle Vernon’s fierce discipline and to cousin Dudley’s frequent abuse.

Then, all at once, after Harry’s 11th birthday, strange events began to happen at the Dursley home. They began when for the first time ever Harry got a letter in the mail. “The envelope was thick and heavy, made of yellowish parchment, and the address was written in emerald-green ink. There was no stamp.” Uncle Vernon snatched the letter from Harry’s hand, and would not let him see it. As the Dursleys read the letter out of Harry’s reach, their faces turned “the grayish white of old porridge.” Harry never did get to see the letter, and was told that it had been misaddressed.

Whereupon a flood of letters began arriving every day, all addressed to Harry, but Uncle Vernon intercepted them all. In desperation, Vernon decided to take the family on an extended trip as a way of escaping the steady flood of incoming mail. Yet everywhere they went, mysteriously, mail continued to arrive, addressed to wherever they were staying. Finally, an emissary from Hogwarts School, Hagrid by name, arrived in person, and handed a letter directly to Harry. It was from Minerva McGonagall, Deputy Headmistress, and it read like this: “Dear Mr Potter, We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Please find enclosed a list of necessary books and equipment. Term begins September 1.”

Hagrid on the spot told Harry that he was the child of a wizard and witch now deceased, and that Harry himself had magical powers, needing only extensive training at Hogwarts in order to make deliberate and proper use of them. The boy was then spirited away by Hagrid to the school where he entered as a first year student.

All of the subsequent Potter books are an account of Harry’s years in training, of his adventures and misadventures during his stay in school.

III
How can we account for the enormous popularity of the saga of Harry Potter? First of all, the books are written in an easily readable, whimsical, imaginative, and humorous style; but that alone does not account for the cross-cultural appeal of the books to young and old. They have an almost universal allure for people everywhere. Why is this? What is it about them that generates the magic, the fascination?

Last fall, in an interview in New York, the author was invited to comment on this question. She said that Harry, Hermione, and Ron bond together at school, become close and lasting friends, because all three of them are “to some extent oddities in the world.” Both Hermione and Harry grew up in Muggles families, so that both, because of their special natures, were misfits in their conventional worlds. Ron, on the other hand, was born and raised by wizard parents; but he grew up surrounded by Muggles, with whom he was out of step. In addition, his father (a wizard) was unconventional even in the world of magic because he had a high level of interest and curiosity about life among the Muggles. The three youngsters, you see, were kindred spirits, shared a common life experience.

However, Rowling pointed out, there are differences between them as well. Harry is more vulnerable to depression than his friends, having grown up in ten years of alternating abuse and neglect. This early childhood experience, Rowling added,”leaves you with an enormous emptiness inside you. He really is a damaged person... He’s also a very brave person, who’s going to keep fighting against depression.”

Now, we humans are so constructed that none of us is entirely pure and good, and Harry, Rowling said, is no exception. He has “flaws and failings.” He can’t help tending to see himself as being less worthy than others, as being the one who has the most inner problems. Nor is Harry a flawless little gentleman. He is more like “an old soul,” she said. “And you meet kids like that. I’ve taught kids like that. They are my people. I like those kids.”

Rowling here gives us some insight into the striking appeal of her books; but let’s consider what others have to say on the subject. Authors often have less objectivity on their work than editors, readers, and critics. There has been an ongoing discussion of Harry Potter among my UU minister colleagues on the Web, where they share insights by e-mail. One of them spoke of the values, the lessons she had perceived in the world of Harry Potter. She noted that Harry is different from conventional people, and that he is despised and distrusted, because of these differences, by some of those who know him. Conventional people much prefer conformity to difference.

Still, he is a persistent fighter in the struggle of good against evil, and it is clear, as he is depicted by the author, that his great gifts may ultimately help save the world from dominance by the forces of evil. Like the world of the Star Wars series, Harry’s universe (he knows all too well) has a dark side as well as a bright side, and he works diligently, bravely for the victory of good. At the same time, he is by no means a Pollyanna. He sees clearly that the dark side is inherent in the structure of life. He is fully aware that we must accept this fact, and confront it squarely.

In addition, it is evident that the goal of Headmaster Albus Dumbledore and Hogwarts School is peace and justice for all, both Wizards and Muggles alike. We learn from the books that peace is not easily achieved, that it takes determination, persistence, sacrifice, and hard work. Peace and justice are not a sure thing, and young people as well as adults can make a difference in the long term striving to achieve it.

Then, there is an insight into the popularity of Harry Potter from a recent issue of New Yorker magazine, in which writer Joan Accocella contended that the central motif of the Potter series is “power, [which is] an important matter for children, since they have so little of it. How does one acquire power? How can it be used well and ill? Does ultimate power lie with the good? (In other words, is there a God?) If so, why is there so much cruelty around?” These are persisting questions in the great religions of the world, and each book in the series deals with these perennial questions from different perspectives, in diverse circumstances.

In the Potter series, Dumbledore can be seen as representing God in the conflict between good and evil; while Voldemort represents the Satanic dimension. There is a passage at the climax, near the end of the first book in the series (The Sorcerer’s Stone), that gives expression to a significant insight into the nature of things. While Voldemort killed Harry’s parents and tried to kill their child, he was unable to do so. The attempt did leave a scar (shaped like a lightening bolt) on Harry’s forehead, but he survived, and lived on to continue the struggle between good and evil in which his parents had lost their lives.

In the last few pages of The Sorcerer’s Stone, Rowling has Harry ask Dumbledore how it was that he was able to survive in spite of Voldemort’s fierce attack. Well, the Headmaster replied: “If there is one thing Voldemort cannot understand, it is love. He didn’t realize love as powerful as your mother’s for you leaves its own mark. Not a scar, no visible sign... to have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever.”

That, I think, is a remarkable passage, and one in harmony with the central teachings of the world’s religious traditions. Its presence at the climax of the first novel in the series goes far to account for the immense appeal of the world of Harry Potter.

But it is evident to me that there is more. Much more. The universal appeal of the Potter books is, I think, best accounted for by the fact that they are colorful and imaginative tales of the conflict in life between good and evil, and the repeated victory of the good, in spite of the fiercely aggressive attacks of the forces for evil.

Since the dawn of history, humans have experienced, universally, a deep, persisting dream, a profound yearning for the triumph of good over evil in their lives. In every age and every culture, humans have held this yearning, this dream deep within themselves. It has found expression in religious traditions everywhere. For example, in the Hebrew-Christian scripture, the yearning is tacitly expressed in these words from the Book of Isaiah which were written almost 3000 years ago: “It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established.... He shall judge between the nations, and shall decide for many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”

This theme is repeated again and again in cultures all over the world. It appears in literature, in religion, in the mass media, in the human heart. You see it in the yearning for a Messiah, an emissary of God who will come to earth and eradicate evil from the world. You see it today in the expectation of a Second Coming of Christ. You see it repeatedly expressed in the mass media: in movies, television, in romance novels, in mystery stories (who-done-its). The widely popular Westerns (both movies and books), in an almost ritual manner, celebrate the ultimate victory of good over evil. The persisting popularity of the Star Wars series is generated by its exciting depiction of the victory of good over evil.

Yes. Human nature and human life are such that we hold in ourselves this wondrous yearning, this dream of a better life than the one we are obliged to live because of the destructive and persisting presence of evil among us and within us.

The universal appeal of Harry Potter is derived from its whimsical and imaginative expression of this ages old human dream.

Dr Alexie Crane
2880 Exeter Place
Santa Barbara, CA 93105
(805) 682-3476

Lex1304@aol.com

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